[palewery]

Can you explain why someone would leave that much money in there? Are there tables that you can bring 250k to? Do these sites pay interest?

How do you trust these sites? A casino in Las Vegas will get huge fines if one of the employees rips off players. How do you know some internal IT guy isn't cheating you?

[heyitsnick]

> Can you explain why someone would leave that much money in there?

For someone in the US, it can be difficult depositing and withdrawing money. It's often easiest to keep your entire bankroll 'online' (in poker sites such as pokerstars or full tilt) rather than in banks or online wallets (such as moneybookers).

250k could be a standard poker bankroll for a high stakes professional poker player. My bankroll that I keep onlien is 50k USD and i don't consider myself a high-stakes player.

>>> Are there tables that you can bring 250k to?

It's 2.5 buyins for 500/1000 NL. There have been +1 million dollar pots heads up - http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/37/televised-poker/1-1-mil....

Although one doesn't normally sit with their bankroll. However due to the friction (time hassle, exchange rates, withdrawal fees) it is sensible to keep multiple buyins online at one time. I play from 5-10 to 25-50 limit and need 50k online spread across 8+ sites so I have enough to keep in action.

>>> Do these sites pay interest?

No.

[BrandonM]

I made a longer post below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452958) that explains it all a bit better, but for poker players, their balances on poker sites serve both as checking accounts (in many ways) and as their capital. That's like asking why a corporation's value is tied up in its stock. A poker player's account balance is his livelihood.

You can sit at some tables with $100K. It's very easy to 4-table. Moreover, it's very easy to have a 10-buy-in swing. This means that at a bare minimum, a legitimate player has at least 15 buy-ins on any given site, and he damned well better have another 15-25 somewhere else (cash, other sites, etc.) if he doesn't want to risk blowing his entire bankroll (going "busto").

The players with these kinds of balances are part of a very tight-knit community that is largely centered around 2+2. FullTilt and PokerStars both have representatives that post there. It is basically to the poker world what Hacker News is to the tech world. If even one player's money was seized for an undisclosed reason, the major sites (which make money hand-over-fist daily from rake) would lose a lot of faith, and their entire business model centers on their customers' good faith.

There were a few people cheating before on UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker. Thanks to the aforementioned community reconciling various players' hand databases (each hand can be logged), they were caught and both of those sites lost a ton of business.

[heyitsnick]

> There were a few people cheating before on UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker. Thanks to the aforementioned community reconciling various players' hand databases (each hand can be logged), they were caught and both of those sites lost a ton of business.

I also replied to your post below but just to clarify this for everyone: despite he effort from hese communities, those involved in he cheating were never caught. In fact. those named by the DoJ as the heads of Absolute Poker are heavily implicated and the company line has been that ownership had changed hands; this is clearly not the case.

And despite significant pressure, large amounts of money has not been returned to players. And despite Absolute/UB temporarily seeing great loss of traffic, they regained and were up to last night the 3rd largest American-facing network or site.

[sanswork]

There are tables where you can play 250k in one hand. Not for me ever but I have a much much smaller balance.

They make more money by being trustworthy than not.

It has happened but it has usually been detected by players noticing unusual patterns in a players actions/win rate.

[heyitsnick]

>> There are tables where you can play 250k in one hand. Not for me ever but I have a much much smaller balance.

To my knowledge the highest stakes spread online are FT NL/PLO games of 500/1k (so buyin is $100k) and 2k/4k limit (you could theoretically buy in for what you like but the largest you could play in a pot would be 24 + 84 = 48k

>>> They make more money by being trustworthy than not. >>> It has happened but it has usually been detected by players noticing unusual patterns in a players actions/win rate.

Not sure what you mean here.

[sanswork]

People rebuy. There have been a number of pots over $250K. Not hundreds but you can find somewhat of a list here http://www.pokerlistings.com/market-pulse/biggest-pots

What I meant is the poker rooms have more to lose by getting caught being dishonest than they have to gain by skimming some profits.

There has been a few cases where employees were found to be using exploits to cheat. In these cases its usually players finding unusual patterns in their play and calling them out on it that has lead to them being caught.

[heyitsnick]

Of course, I didn't mean to suggest large pots did not occur. I linked above to a million dollar pot.

> What I meant is the poker rooms have more to lose by getting caught being dishonest than they have to gain by skimming some profits.

I wish it were that easy. A recent example is Microgaming. 20 skins of that network (a network still going today with sites like ladbrokes, 32bet are part of) went down, and took with it 5 million dollars of deposits. Players weren't refunded; microgaming did not honour those deposits.

>>> There has been a few cases where employees were found to be using exploits to cheat. In these cases its usually players finding unusual patterns in their play and calling them out on it that has lead to them being caught.

In the UltimateBet cheating scandal, it is assumed the vast majority of funds stolen from players was not returned. No one involved was caught. A man strongly connected with the cheating at UB was one of the 12 named by the DoJ as an owner of UB/AP.

[BrandonM]

> To my knowledge the highest stakes spread online are FT NL/PLO games of 500/1k (so buyin is $100k)

Aren't there deep-stacked high buy-in games now? Besides, I actually have a screen shot where I sat at a .25/.50 table ($50 buyin) long enough to get it up to $500, or 10 buyins. Surely it's possible for two players to sit at 500/1K and get the balance up over 250K. I'd even dare to say that in a reasonably-long headsup match, it would be very likely.